Alchemy is the Sister of Prophecy

"...The mundus imaginalis is the place, and consequently the world, where not only the visions of the prophets, the visions of the mystics, the visionary events which each human soul traverses at the time of his exitus from the world, the events of the lesser Resurrection and the Greater Resurrection "take place" and have their "place," but also the gestes of the mystical epics the symbolic acts of all the rituals of initiation, litrugies in general with their symbols, the "composition of the ground" in various methods of prayer..., the spiritual filiations whose authenticity is not within the competence of documents and archives, and equally the esoteric processus of the Alchemical Work, in connection with which the First Imam of the Shi'ites was able to say 'Alchemy is the Sister of Prophecy.'" Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth, xi.

"We have here a mineralogy, a crystallography, a botany, a zoology whose 'objects' are used and studied as mirrors. The beings of the three Kingdoms are mirrors that render visible the constellations of the superior world..." "The alchemist operates - meditates - on all the metals as the hermeneut practices the symbolic exegesis... of a text." "...[I]t is the true imagination that makes the link between the alchemical operation and the interior transmutation." Henry Corbin, Lectures, 1973 - Quoted by Pierre Lory, Introduction to Corbin, l'Alchimie comme Art Hieratique, Paris: l'Herne, 1986, 11-13.

Image: Alchemists at work, 15th century. British Library, London. From artresource.